Attack of the Drones - USA

Howard Zinn’s History of HateHoward Zinn, who died of a heart attack last week at the age of 87, was a scholar of extraordinary influence. Indeed, few academicians did more than the late Boston University professor to poison the minds of so many young Americans with a vulgar narrative of history in which the United States was forever cast as the villain. The author of more than twenty books, Zinn was best known for his 1980 publication of A People’s History of the United States. Though its first press run consisted of a mere 4,000 copies, by 2003 the book had topped a million sales over the course of multiple editions. On this count, Chomsky was correct. Zinn’s portrayal of America, the world’s standard-bearer for capitalism, reflected his deeply held conviction that free-markets breed greed, vice, and suffering. “I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. “There’s no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete. “So what?

Artists install massive poster of child’s face in Pakistan field to shame drone operatorsBy Tom BoggioniSunday, April 6, 2014 17:40 EDT An artists collective has unfurled a massive poster showing a child’s face in a heavily bombed area of Pakistan in the hopes that it will give pause to drone operators searching the area for kills. According to #notabugsplat, named after the description given to kills on the ground when viewed through grainy video footage, the artists – with help of villagers – unfurled the giant poster in a field in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan. The hope is that it will increase awareness of drone operators of human cost, or ‘collateral damage’, when drones are used to attack targets on the ground. The massive poster is also large enough to be captured by satellites collecting landscapes for online mapping sites. #notabugssplat claims the installation was done with the help of artists associated with French artist JR’s ‘Inside Out’ movement.

Circle of Stories . Storytellers . Corbin HarneyRead and listen to “The Water Song” story Biography: The Bear Goes Hungry When Corbin Harney was a boy, he would run away from the missionary school where he was forced to sit and listen to a language he did not speak or understand. The children were punished for talking to each other in their own native tongue. Having lost his parents when he was a baby, he came to live with his uncle who gave him the choice of staying in school or going off into the mountains to learn to survive on his own. Corbin took two horses and went into the hills of Idaho to live off the land his people had called home for centuries. Today, Corbin Harney is a spiritual leader, healer and internationally known indigenous rights and anti-nuclear weapons activist. At 83 years old, you can find Corbin living what he calls “the Nature Way,” swinging a sledge hammer while directing the construction at Poo Ha Bah, his traditional healing center outside of Death Valley, California. Tribe: Western Shoshone (The Newe)

Drone killings case thrown out in US | World newsA US federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against the government by the families of three American citizens killed by drones in Yemen, saying senior officials cannot be held personally responsible for money damages for the act of conducting war. The families of the three – including Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born militant Muslim cleric who had joined al-Qaida's Yemen affiliate, as well as his teenage son – sued over their 2011 deaths in US drone strikes, arguing that the killings were illegal. Judge Rosemary Collyer of the US district court in Washington threw out the case, which had named as defendants the former defence secretary and CIA chief Leon Panetta, the former senior military commander and CIA chief David Petraeus and two other top military commanders. "The question presented is whether federal officials can be held personally liable for their roles in drone strikes abroad that target and kill U.S. citizens," Collyer said in her opinion.

The Trend Toward Part-Time EmploymentLet's take a close look at Friday's employment report numbers on Full and Part-Time Employment. Buried near the bottom of Table A-9 of the government's Employment Situation Summary are the numbers for Full- and Part-Time Workers, with 35-or-more hours as the arbitrary divide between the two categories. The Labor Department has been collecting this since 1968, a time when only 13.5% of US employees were part-timers. That number peaked at 20.1% in January 2010. The latest data point, over four years later, is only modestly lower at 18.9%, up from 18.8% last month, which was the interim low. Here is a visualization of the trend in the 21st century, with the percentage of full-time employed on the left axis and the part-time employed on the right. The Impact of the Great Recession Here is a closer look since 2007. The two charts above are seasonally adjusted and include the entire workforce, which the CPS defines as age 16 and over. The Core Workforce: Ages 25-54

Targeted killing, wikipediaTargeted killing is the premeditated killing of an individual by a state organization or institution outside a judicial procedure or a battlefield. Targeted killings were employed extensively by death squads in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Haiti within the context of civil unrest and war during the 1980s and 1990s. Targeted killings have also been used in Somalia, Rwanda, and in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars. Currently the US government practices targeted killings semi-publicly, as with the killing of Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Awlaki. Targeted killings have also been used by narcotics traffickers. Early History[edit] In Central and South America[edit] The United States Department of State's Human Rights Report in 1994 decried such killings, noting that in Haiti, "right-wing thugs, closely allied with the military, assassinated the legitimately appointed justice minister and conducted many other targeted killings By drug cartels[edit] In Somalia and Rwanda[edit] Background[edit]